Saved by Google Translation!

English is a fairly universal language when it comes to the travel business. Even when it comes to making bookings at rural ryokans in Japan, I've managed with emails in English. Finally, I hit the limits of English being the universal business language when I tried to get a confirmation for a hotel booking in Sendai, Japan (home to Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque). And Sendai is a city, not the countryside!

For this particular trip that I was planning for a client, I had corresponded in English with Saryo Souen, a ryokan in the nearby onsen town of Akiu as well as a hotel in Matsushima, all without problems. But when it came to booking Sendai Kokusai Hotel, my emails went unanswered. So I resorted to calling. All seemed to go well in English until I asked for a confirmation by email. That did not happen. So I got FS, one of our Japanese-conversant partners to make the call to no avail. Finally, I caved and turned to online translation tools. I normally use online translation tools to read emails that come in in a different language (for example, the one in Spanish from Ecuador confirming that a transfer had been made). But up to now, I've shied away from using them to send translated versions of my correspondences. Because reading what I see translated for me in English, I figure the recipient at best would be laughing out loud, and at worst would be absolutely puzzled. But I was at my wits' end with Sendai Kokusai so I decided to give Google's Language Tools a whirl (Normally, I use Alta Vista's Babel Fish, but for some strange reason, I decided to give Google a try).

The first email I shot off got a reply within an hour. The reply, oddly enough, came back in English. But the reply had misundertood my request (to change a current booking to a different date. Instead, they thought i wanted to extend the booking to the new date.). So I simplified my email to read (of course, I have no idea what the Japanese really says. I was simply going on blind faith that it said I wanted to book a double room for the night of 19 December):

Subject: 緊急: 2006年の12月19日予約

仙台貴重なKokusaiのホテル、
私は2006年12月19日に1夜の氏のためにXXX 1つの二人部屋を確保することを望む。 電子メールによって確認しなさい。
本当にありがとう、Winnie

The reply came back promptly:

Dear XXX

Thank you for your E-mail.

Your reservation is completion.

On 19,December 2006.

For 1 night,1double room 2people.

Room charge \21945(tax included)

Thank you

Sendai Kokusai Hotel

Reservation Desk

Finally! Success after a week of unanswered emails and long-distance phone calls (thankfully, there's Skype). So two useful lessons learnt:
1. A poorly-translated request in the recipient's language is appreciated and therefore worth the effort.
2. Be careful how the original text is phrased before translation. Keep ideas and sentance structure as simple as possible. Otherwise, meaning can get lost in translation if not totally warped.

Tagged! & Tokyo wanderings through Meguro/Daikanyama

Just finished tagging all my previous posts. It's not a perfect system (for example, if you wanted to find all the posts on restaurants in Hong Kong, it's still probably easier to go through the results from google search function for the site), but basically there are two types of tags: destination (country, state/province, city.) or subject (such as hotels and restaurants that both take up 32% of my posts). The only subject tag that might require a bit of explanation is "services". Services encompasses everything from gyms, personal trainers, pilates instructors to spa & beauty services to telco, etc.

Here's the last bit from last weekend in Tokyo. While it rained on Saturday, it was absolutely beautiful on Sunday and Monday. I stayed with SM at her wonderful pad in Daikanyama. It was about a 15-20 minute walk to the Starbucks across from Shibuya station and only a 10-minute walk to Daikanyama station. On the way back from Shibuya Starbucks to the shopping around Daikanyama station, I decided to go for a detour along the streets behind Cerulean Hotel and got a little bit lost. But it was great, because I passed by lots of beautiful homes before finally following the Daikanyama loop bus to get back on track to my usual stop at Bonjour Records. This time, I found an awesome 24-hour food shop called Seijo Ishii. Great if you've run out of snacks and Champagne at 2am in the morning.

Here are some pictures of my walk. The Japanese are known for their politeness, so I just had to take a picture of this:

Elements of nice homes along the way:






Red leaves are coming!! As usual, global warming is just messing up the timing for red leaves and cherry blossoms.

Tokyo: Massato Paris, Sushi Restaurant Hashida, Tadao Ando's Omotesando Hills, Asuka

Am posting with the new beta.blogger.com, so please let me know if there are any glitches. Will be updating old posts with labels (i.e. blogger's version of tags) in the next couple weeks.

Massato Paris -- One of the things I like doing in Tokyo is getting my haircut. It’s not expensive and they always do a good job. But if you’re not a Japanese speaker, make sure you go with someone who does or make sure the place you’re going to has an English-speaker on hand. Last year, I went to Kakimoto Arms with LS in Roppongi Hills. This year, MH did the booking, so I joined her at Massato Paris, across the street from Grand Hyatt (above the Versace shop). I like the nice, little touches, like the head and shoulder massage after the final hair rinse and the post-cut tea and candies platter.

Sushi Restaurant Hashida (3-8-11, Kachidoki, Chuoh-Ku, Tokyo 104-0054, Japan; T: +81 3 3533 0341) -- For lunch, SM had booked one of her favourite sushi places near Ginza. She warned us, though, their specialty is BIG sushi. The first time she went, she said the sushi chef looked really angry and barely spoke to her. Towards the end, he just handed her a photo album. Inside were pictures of the likes of Will Smith, Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz with the sushi chef in his little sushi restaurant. Lunch is a set menu. The only thing you get to choose is whether you want your explosive, finale sushi to be uni (sea urchin) or ikura (salmon roe). The rest did not disappoint. I rarely eat scallop, shrimp or clam sushi, but the ones served here were delicious and sweet. I ordered uni for my explosive sushi and boy was it explosive! I was served enough uni to make at least 5 pieces of normal-sized sushi. All that sushi for around Y3,000!

The sushi chef did not look so fierce this time around. He was working behind the counter with his son by his side. They made a great father-son team. After the meal, he showed us the famous photo album and even had a brief chat with us. "You have to thank the people who come for dinner," said Hashida-san Sr., because they are the ones subsidizing the low-cost lunch set.

Omotesando Hills -- After lunch, continuing with the starchitect-designed shopping mall theme, we visited Omotesando Hills, Tadao Ando's shopping mall for Minoru Mori. It is supposed to resemble a long street promenade inside the building. MH complained that she didn't like the fact that she had to stroll by all the shops just to get to a shop at the top. It's great for retailers and those who have to lease the space out to potential retailers don't have to deal with the problem of potentially dead spaces. I, personally liked the indoor boulevard feel. The mall is intimate in size, compared to present-day mega-malls (like last week's visit to Toyo Ito's Vivo City in Singapore) and I like that sort of intimacy. And there's a simple logic of having one path to follow. For a shopper, it's much more reassuring, less overwhelming. The formal simplicity actually creates a certain visual/spatial poetry or rhythm, which I like. In a way, it's soothing; true retail therapy.


Asuka -- For dinner, SI had booked kaiseki for us at a restaurant in Shimokitazawa within walking distance from his place, which is in Uemura, a quiet, idyllic neighborhood (SM called it the Greenwich Village of Tokyo). We stopped by SI's place for Champagne before walking to Asuka. SI had arranged for us to sit at the counter, because he thought it would be a more interesting experience. The chef here was a very cheery one. He had a sort of happy buddha kind of serenity to his face.


The food was amazing. We chose the menu with crab for a little under Y10,000 per person. I always think a restaurant is really good when they can get me to try and like things that I normally wouldn't touch. I am not a fan of tofu of the Chinese variety, but I think the Japanese are masters of tofu dishes. So when a broth with milk tofu suspended in it arrived, I thought I'd try it, even though I normally don't like tofu. I did not regret my decision. The milk tofu looked like a ball of mozzarella cheese. The consistency was different from regular tofu, it was kind of elastic. Buried inside was uni.


Even though we had sushi for lunch, the sashimi was still a treat:


But the really unforgettable dish was the crab, which came complete with what my SM translated as crab ovaries (the bright orange gook, which was actually quite tasty!), crab roe (the darker brown bits) and the crab meat. In terms of eating adventures though, last week's sperm of whale at Iggy's in Singapore still takes the cake.

Tokyo: Shibuya Granbell Hotel, good things come in red, Tera Teppanyaki

I love Tokyo; it's one of the few cities in the world where I always feel like a lost foreigner despite the number of times I've been here. Diane von Furstenberg was in town last week for the opening of her first boutique in Japan with her whole entourage. MH, who's in town for other work, was guiding/hanging out with them and apparently it was the first time in Japan for some in DvF's group (including her son) and they absolutely loved it (especially the Loveless shop in Aoyama). The thing is, for a gaijin, or foreigner (such as myself), Tokyo will always be fresh and new, no matter how many times you visit. There'll always be that sense of excitement of the new and different, that buzz of not quite knowing what you'll stumble upon, the thrill of a mystery you'll never quite solve.

I arrived into Narita around 1400 and surprisingly the immigration queue was very short and moved quickly. Managed to get my luggage, rent my 3G phone (it's great that these days I can keep my Hong Kong number), grab some Starbucks


(Japan's stores probably have some of the best Starbucks food around and they have these really cool, Starbucks mermaid stirrers that are also stoppers for the lid that I haven't seen anywhere else in the world!) and caught the 1513 Narita Express out to Shinjuku station. It's a great thing these days to be able to get on the internet and show taxi drivers the location maps for where you want to go, because even with the English address for Shibuya Granbell Hotel, he wasn't quite sure where it was.

In terms of location, Shibuya Granbell is really great, a few minutes' walk to Shibuya station, less than 10 minutes to Parco Part One. But the best part is that it's on a quiet street, off the main strip. Downstairs, there's a nice cafe/bar that's open late called Piece of Pie. I booked a Double Room for Single Use (Y16,800, including ++!!). This is one of the very, very few hotels that offers a cheaper rate for single use of a double room. The room is very comfortable with all my necessary amenities. It has free LAN internet access and the cable's in the desk drawer. The bathroom has a tub (which is such a rarity in so-called boutique hotelrooms these days) and I had ample space to maneouver around with my bags laid out. Very good value for money. They have a great penthouse duplex suite with its own rooftop jacuzzi.


Good things come in RED! I got 2 wonderful surprises, both red. MH dropped by my hotel and produced a gift for me. It was a namecard holder from Inden-Ya. I had seen her namecard holder with a wonderful cream-dotted pattern on what she tells me is deer skin (navy blue). I had fallen in love with it and kept harrassing her to tell me where she got it. Unfortunately, it was a gift to her from her father so she didn't really know exactly where to buy it. Between her meetings here this time around, she chanced upon a shop selling Inden-Ya's wares, and got me my very own namecard holder with tan flower-shaped dots on red deer skin (red is my lucky colour). I found their website via google, so hopefully I'll have time to drop by their store.

The next wonderful surprise was that the GAP store near Parco sells their Product (RED) line! I had actually called Singapore's first GAP store, which just opened in Vivo City, but they had no idea what I was talking about. So when I saw the line here, I kind of went crazy and bought a whole bunch of inspi(red), desi(red) and hamme(red) t-shirts to give as gifts.


After a spot of shopping, SM picked us up and took us out for teppanyaki. Tera is a discrete, little teppanyaki restaurant in Nishi-Azabu that probably seats around 10 people at the counter and then another 20-25 people around tables. If you didn't know of its existence, you'd probably overlook its non-descript entrance. Once inside, you walk downstairs and there's a teppanyaki counter and behind it several screened-off tables. We sat at the counter. The first dish that came was uni on top of a small portion of grilled rice on top of crispy, grilled seaweed. It was absolutely delicious, the uni being very fresh and sweet in taste. Next came a Japanese teppanyaki version of raclette -- vegetables with cheese. We also had beef fillet and sirloin, garlic fried rice (which came with a wonderful broth), and vanilla ice-cream topped with grilled strawberries, all were wonderful! I'm so glad that I now know another good teppanyaki place aside from Seryna's Mon Cher Ton Ton.


After dinner, we went to nearby birth for a drink. I had yuzu tea. There's supposed to be a fortune-telling lady that goes around the tables, but when we saw how depressed a couple of girls looked after their readings, we opted not to take our chances.